many right-angled juts and recessions, arose out of a bed of greenery
and bloom.

Spanish in character, the architecture of the Big House was not of the
California-Spanish type which had been introduced by way of Mexico a
hundred years before, and which had been modified by modern architects
to the California-Spanish architecture of the day. Hispano-Moresque
more technically classified the Big House in all its hybridness,
although there were experts who heatedly quarreled with the term.

Spaciousness without austerity and beauty without ostentation were the
fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and
horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines
of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as
those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the
hint of monotony.

Low and rambling, without being squat, the square upthrusts of towers
and of towers over-topping towers gave just proportion of height
without being sky-aspiring. The sense of the Big House was solidarity.
It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest
concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this
very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it
not been saved by the many flat roofs of warm-red Spanish tile.

In that one sweeping glance while the mare whirled unduly, Dick
Forrest's eyes, embracing all of the Big House, centered for a quick
solicitous instant on the great wing across the two-hundred-foot
court, where, under climbing groups of towers, red-snooded in the
morning sun, the drawn shades of the sleeping-porch tokened that his